Saturday 29 January 2011 19.05 EST
First published on Saturday 29 January 2011 19.05 EST

Books with "the west" in the title proliferate in tandem with the Chinese economy, and contain nothing for our comfort. To argue against a "lock-in" theory of western superiority, Why the West Rules aspires to a unified, egalitarian theory of history with the soft parts – culture, values, religion – missed out. For Ian Morris, an archeologist by training, "maps versus chaps" is what it's about, and if we accept his perkily scientistic premise that "chaps" are the same the world over, "maps" – geography – is all that is left.

It follows that the reasons the west rules for now are to be found entirely (his word) in brute, material forces. To understand the evolution of the human species, all we need is a grid to measure progress, and Morris has invented it. The "index of social development" comprises energy capture, organisation/urbanisation, information technology, and war-making capacity.

There is no ghost in Morris's machine. Cultural history, he implies, is bunk: "East and west got the thought they needed," and in any case, the major religions, cultural trends and the rest are basically the same. All that matters are the numbers, which after a few hundred pages take on an almost comical abstraction: "Even in 1500 western social development was still a full 10 points lower than the norm reached a millennium and a half earlier."

The arbitrariness needed to sustain the theory is there from the beginning. "The east" omits India, to concentrate on China, and the west's historical frontiers are hazy. But then Morris has selected these as his "cores of development", so that is that.

The fluctuations he charts between degrees of advance in east and west can be engaging but will surprise no one. In his terms, the two were more or less on level pegging until the dark ages, when the east moved substantially ahead, only to relapse when the west, through no inherent virtue, embarked on mass industrialisation. (China had been ahead in power-assisted spinning and coal and iron production centuries before.) In all this, the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, he is at pains to show, were of no essential importance.

Morris's dismissal of the notion that the west went ahead because it was rational and dynamic while China was obscurantist and conservative gets him into trouble. His discussion of Zheng He, the 15th-century Chinese admiral whose boats were infinitely bigger and better than the west's, but whose extraordinary feats of exploration were curtailed abruptly, never to be resumed, is fascinating but incomplete.

Why did the Chinese not press their advantage? He can only hint at the likely truth: because they had a somewhat conservative and autarchic mindset at the time. But then, mindsets can have no place in Morris's materialistic universe (a mindset of its own), so this momentous non-turning point in world history remains unexplained.

As a work of synthesis the book is phenomenal, but breadth isn't everything, and the closer we get to modernity the more insecure Morris's expertise, and the weaker his theory. Any suggestion that the west may have entrenched its lead for anything other than material reasons is studiously avoided. The UK had "arguably more open institutions" than China, he writes. What is that "arguably" doing? Who pretends otherwise?

The Salem witch trials, on the other hand, are highlighted, though they pale into insignificance beside the Puritans' advances in science (the Royal Society had American members), finance, economics and (in Massachusetts) women's rights before the law. But if ideas are a consequence of material circumstances and not a cause, then it hardly matters.

When centuries or millennia are being thrown around, we like to feel in safe hands, yet Morris's facts and judgments can be crankily awry: "Whatever his faults, Mao Zedong banned foot-binding immediately on assuming power in 1949." It was banned on 1 February 1902, by the Empress Dowager. And those "faults" included the biggest man-made calamity in history – the Great Leap Forward – in which Morris later says that 20 million people died. The Chinese Communist party would be surprised to hear it: an internal report admitted double that, years ago.

The book's assumptions can be strangely dated. Who are these diehard believers in locked-in western superiority? It was almost a century ago that Spengler, author of The Decline of the West – a book unmentioned here – wrote: "And so presently the 'natives' saw into our secrets and understood them, and used them to the full. The innumerable hands of the coloured races – at least as clever, and far less exigent – will shatter the economic organisation of the whites to its foundations."

Having lived in China, it has never occurred to me, or to most people who haven't, to underrate the country's historical achievements or potential. As the guilt-laden western-declinist industry expands on US campuses, we should watch for people such as Morris breaching their own iron rule: that people in the mass are the same everywhere. If global egalitarianism is the premise, why seek to set the guilt of one people above another?

And after all, we non-archaeologists can get sentimentally attached to the soft parts of history – faiths, values, culture – in our belief that they have something to do with being human, and can resent attempts to downplay their role in favour of impersonal forces. I thought we'd been through all that?

As for Morris's much-vaunted revelations about the future, so simple to predict now he has his grid, they come down to the need to avoid nuclear and environmental catastrophe so that history can continue. On his bleakly deterministic interpretation of our lives, it is not too clear why we should want that.